Author: sami_snst

I have wanted to start this blog for quite a while, and I find that now that I am here it is harder than I expected. Why am I here, writing a blog? I am a writer. It is one of the few things I have known about myself with little doubt. I am also trying to come to terms with severe abuse from my early childhood. I am able to talk about and share my recovery journey with my friends and family to a shallow extent, but there are a lot of things that I downplay or just don’t talk about because I feel it would hurt them. I still have not been able to share what happened to me while in the care of those they trusted.

It started coming back to me last year. I had been through therapy before because of some abuse when I was a teenager and adult. As soon as the memories started to surface, my emotions lost all sense of reason. My body started to feel like it was beyond my control. My depression resurfaced almost immediately throwing me into a trench where I could not see the light of day. Flashbacks overtook my present making even the simplest task nearly impossible. My health got worse and worse. I got help right away this time, and yet I was still unprepared for what I was about to uncover about my own life.

These were different from anything I had ever known. I couldn’t talk about it from my perspective, I could only say she or the little girl. I didn’t want to associate with what I was seeing, hearing, or feeling. I didn’t want to believe the things I remembered. I didn’t want to feel the emotions. I started to shut down. I stopped being able to do all of the things that I used to do. It felt like I could barely breathe through all the pain.

I kept moving, kept going, kept shoving it down. I still went to therapy, and I would purge the poisonous memories each week, but I did not want them to be mine. I kept asking my counselor if I was crazy. I didn’t want to believe my own mind, my own body, my own experience. I didn’t want this to be my tale. I had known that I had been molested from the time I was 11 or 12. I had known I had been raped at 17 and then again as an adult. The things I remembered at this point were far harder for me to deal with then the memories I had always known.

I don’t want to diminish my experiences from when I was an older child because I have come to understand that abuse is abuse. I cannot deny the long term effects these few experiences had on me. The new stuff, the new memories were far more numerous. There were now hours upon hours, days, weeks, years that chronicled the breaking of a child’s mind, body, and spirit all without my parents noticing. All without me remembering. The child forgot in order to be a child when she was finally free. The child was me. I was broken intentionally by adults who didn’t give a whit about me as a person, but only saw me as a thing to be used and sold and traded.

I almost gave up when I finally reached that level of acceptance after months and months of denial. It took over a month of therapy twice a week, staying in touch with my family doctor, and quitting pretty much all extra-curricular activities before I reached a point where I could live with the knowledge. It’s still quite suffocating at times. My mind will shut down now when it gets to be too much. Some days my mind shuts down and shuts off my emotions at the drop of a hat, and other times I make it to the level of understanding before it gives me a break.

I found twitter while scouring the internet for any and all resources dealing with childhood sexual trauma. I found Trauma Recovery University, and I joined Twitter for the Monday night Q&A. I find I need community, and I need to know that my experiences while unique to me and my story does not mean I am alone in this world. I can and do find healing in a chorus of me toos on a you tube video or twitter feed, even in my anonymity.

This is my blog about the truth of my reality as I rarely get to share it, without censorship by me or others, in my preferred format, writing.